According to the report, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled there was sufficient evidence to not necessitate sifting through each of the 7,000 claims after the physician appealed his original settlement.
The court found it circumstantially telling that the jurors saw multiple hospice patients testifying at trial nearly a decade after the convicted physician had recommended them for end-of-life care.
After reports of fraudulent hospice patients, multiple agencies conducted a joint investigation that found the physician was the common denominator among multiple implicated hospice providers. In some cases, the physician would recommend patients for hospice care without seeing the patients, among other allegations.
The hospice providers billed Medicare more than $16 million, and the physician received more than $400,000 in his role as the medical director, according to the report.
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